These three poems by Shamala Gallagher present a dialectic between nothingness and somethingness: "What I want to look at is bareness, how it is not a hard stone to turn to but a wave that glitters to itself in the nothing." The speakers in these poems struggle to find a space of pure emptiness, eventually wearing themselves "down / to the hour's white pit" in their quest. None of the poems states explicitly why the speakers are contemplating or seeking nothingness, instead gesturing toward possible events: "What it is to love someone who stares at nothing." These speakers, though, are unable to find nothingness that isn't contained in somethingness, with the nothing contained in the something of an empty bowl or empty bead. This creates a discomfort that evokes a singular and poignant version of mourning and loss. These are not poems of breast-beating and wailing or elegizing; these are poems generating that moment in which we feel like we have nothing, we have lost everything, in which we want everything to be nothing, and yet everywhere we look we find only something. This something that forces itself upon us becomes both the source of our pain and the source of our eventual healing, our return to the tender world: "I moved here, horizon note of droning bugs so I could hear the time go on."
Andrew Wessels

Poem

What it is to love someone who stares at nothing. Empty bead. Sky is close as bedsheets folding over a face and night is usual. Eyes are only brown and circle. Sighs are sighs. Here and there on the wall a mosquito like a hair on the bare page of the shower. I took away and away each easy joy and each grin I wanted to meet, each flicker of light on a stage. Until there was only you and the day like a bare floor. What I want to look at is bareness, how it is not a hard stone to turn to but a wave that glitters to itself in the nothing. The world is here with its inimitable aches but it is like this too. Or I don’t know. I met someone who had been hungry for a year and eating never sated it, and now it started in me. You look at the poison in someone’s blood and you wish you could feel it. Then you’ve stood in the opening dark until one day the poison’s in yours. You waited with your finger there while I opened to myself. This is love. I moved here, horizon note of droning bugs so I could hear the time go on.